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airport arrivals hall. She was wearing a strange knitted grey duffel-coat thing that he wasn’t altogether sure what to make of, and knee-length high-heeled black suede boots, of which he approved unreservedly. A knitted black polo neck burgeoned from the top of the coat-thing, almost exactly the same colour as her hair.
    ‘Hello,’ he said back, altogether less explosively.
    She drew level with him, plunging her hands back into the pockets of the coat. ‘Chilly, isn’t it?’
    ‘Very,’ he said. ‘But then it is January.’ He smiled. ‘So.’
    ‘So,’ she said back. ‘Where are we off to, then?’
    She didn’t make any gestures towards the hotel, which made Jack surer still that he should have booked a table at the Razzi restaurant, despite its ridiculous name. She looked like she would sit well in their window, but he also decided that if he said McDonalds at this point, she would not bat so much as one of her thickly-lashed eyelids. She had no make-up on at all, as far as he could tell. He liked that.
    ‘I thought we’d go to Beano’s,’ he said, proffering an arm to guide the small of her back in the right direction.
    ‘Oooh, lovely,’ she said, moving off before his arm made contact. He dropped it self-consciously and fell into step.
    ‘You know it, then, do you?’
    ‘I went there for my divorce party,’ she said, turning to grin at him. ‘Got comprehensively wasted and took out an urn. I hope they’ll let me in.’
    Jack had not had a divorce party. He’d just got comprehensively wasted at home.
    Beano’s was the kind of restaurant that Cardiff was sprouting all over the place these days. Achingly trendy, full of braying office workers. The kind of restaurant that tried to sell you onion marmalade and shrink-wrapped biscottis, and alarming-sounding mustards full of bits of twig. But the guy who ran the place knew him and could be relied upon to gush. Hope, who looked agreeably impressed by all this, studied her menu enthusiastically, going ‘hmmm’ a lot and nodding.
    ‘So,’ he said again, noticing with some alarm that the word had become a pre-cursor to many of his conversational openers of late. As if he were on Question Time or trying to organise a group of cub scouts. ‘Your fun run.’
    She smiled at him over the top of her menu.
    ‘Our fun run,’ she said, nodding. ‘In actual fact, I’m not sure ‘fun run’ is quite the word we should be using. It’s five kilometres, and there’s a bitch of a hill half way through. We don’t really want to encourage any cardiac arrests, do we?’ She giggled delightfully. ‘But yes. That’s what it is.’
    The waiter, a brisk antipodean in a long leather apron, brought glasses of iced water. Jack picked his up and took a long swallow. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s it in aid of, exactly?’
    She hugged her menu and leaned forwards.
    ‘Well, you know what we’re about, presumably.’
    ‘Er… heart disease?’
    ‘Exactly. Though in its broadest sense. I mean, we are about raising money for heart disease – well, not for heart disease, of course. We don’t organise food drops of saturated fats or anything. Ha ha. But more for the support of families whose lives have been touched by heart disease, which is slightly different.’
    ‘Sort of “if you or a member of your family has been affected by any of the issues raised in this programme” type of thing, then.’
    She picked up her glass and sipped from it, nodding.
    ‘Exactly. I mean, we do give a lot for research, but our more high-profile activities are all about one-on-one support. We handle a lot of individual cases. You know, support for families when, oh, I don’t know, someone has to have bypass surgery or something. Financial support. Respite care. That sort of thing. It’s a very broad remit. But that’s not my area really. I’m in fundraising, of course.’
    ‘Of course. And this is a fairly ambitious fundraiser, by the sound of it. And your baby, I take